Navigation

Search

Many “modern” Windows programs have a feature (some would say
annoyance) of presenting the user tips at program startup.

While this is probably useless to the advanced users of the program,
the experience shows that the tips may be quite helpful for the
novices and so more and more programs now do this. For a wxPython
programmer, implementing this feature is extremely easy. To show a
tip, it is enough to just call wx.ShowTip function like this:

Of course, you need to get the text of the tips from somewhere - in
the example above, the text is supposed to be in the file tips.txt
from where it is read by the tip provider. The tip provider is just an
object of a class deriving from TipProvider. It has
to implement one pure virtual function of the base class, GetTip. In
the case of the tip provider created by
wx.CreateFileTipProvider, the tips are just the lines of the
text file.

If you want to implement your own tip provider (for example, if you
wish to hardcode the tips inside your program), you just have to
derive another class from TipProvider and pass a
pointer to the object of this class to func:wx.ShowTip - then you
don’t need wx.CreateFileTipProvider at all.

You will probably want to save somewhere the index of the tip last
shown - so that the program doesn’t always show the same tip on
startup. As you also need to remember whether to show tips or not (you
shouldn’t do it if the user unchecked “Show tips on startup” checkbox
in the dialog), you will probably want to store both the index of the
last shown tip (as returned by
GetCurrentTip and the flag telling whether
to show the tips at startup at all.

In a tips.txt file, lines that begin with a # character are
considered comments and are automatically skipped. Blank lines and
lines only having spaces are also skipped.

You can easily add runtime-translation capacity by placing each line
of the tips.txt file inside the usual translation function. For
example, your tips.txt file would look like this:

_("This is my first tip")_("This is my second tip")

Now add your tips.txt file into the list of files that gettext
searches for translatable strings. The tips will thus get included
into your generated .po file catalog and be translated at runtime
along with the rest of your application’s translatable strings.

Note

Each line in the tips.txt file needs to strictly begin with
exactly the 3 characters of underscore-parenthesis-doublequote, and
end with doublequote-parenthesis, as shown above. Also, remember to
escape any doublequote characters within the tip string with a
backslash-doublequote.